Faulty Tower

Call it high-rise schadenfreude. There doesn’t seem to be any noticeable degree of distress around the world about the fact that the observation deck on the 124th floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai closed only a few days after it opened to the public, in January, the victim, apparently, of faulty elevators. Like Toyota and its unintended acceleration, the owner of the tower, Emaar Properties, at first tried to keep the problem quiet, then called it a minor electrical malfunction. It was only later that visitors reported hearing an explosion in an elevator shaft, and revealed that an elevator had dropped several floors, trapping numerous visitors for close to an hour, and that many other tourists were stranded up in the observation deck for much longer. Now, several weeks later, the tower remains closed to the public, its problems presumably unresolved.

In time they will get fixed. Elevators remain one of the safer, if duller, modes of transportation around. (For much more on elevators, read Nick Paumgarten’s story from 2008.) The striking thing about this event isn’t the technological failure it represents, but the way in which so many people view the closing of the tower as the natural result of Dubai’s hubris. Just today, a writer named Melissa Lasky, posting in a blog called The Infrastructurist, under the headline “Karmic Justice?” noted that the elevator problems at the Burj were followed this week by a leak in the massive shark tank of the gargantuan Dubai Mall that was severe enough to require that the mall be evacuated. “It’s been a heck of a month for the city of ultimate excess,” Lasky said.

Yes, indeed. Beware of building too high, or too wide, or too big; the gods punish those who challenge them. It turns out that the vast tower, which like the oversize mall was put up to encourage the world to view Dubai as a serious place, is having exactly the opposite effect. It isn’t inspiring awe so much as bemusement, and a sense that Dubai is getting what it deserved. The tower, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is a fairly serious piece of architecture, but since almost everything else in Dubai is built for consumption and entertainment, the Burj Khalifa and its troubles are being viewed that way, too. The tale of a hundred-and-sixty-story tower that the world never really needed, and that now can’t seem to be made to work right, isn’t fall-on-the-floor hilarious, but nobody seems to view it as particularly tragic, either.

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